Reached 50 people in my encrypted group chat and suddenly got nervous

I run a small Signal group for activists in my city, mostly people organizing around tenant rights. Last week we hit 50 members, which felt like a big milestone but also spooked me. I started this group 6 months ago with just 3 people I knew from a local meeting, and it grew by word of mouth. Now I worry about who is actually in here. 50 people means someone could be a plant or just not careful with their opsec. I had to spend a whole afternoon updating the pinned messages about basic encryption settings and reminding everyone to turn off message previews on their lock screen. Has anyone else had a group get big enough that you started questioning your own security rules?

2 comments

2 Comments

dakota_singh3923d ago

Gotta laugh so I don't cry about it, right? I remember when my D&D group chat hit 30 people and I panicked because someone asked about "the password" in the general channel and I realized half the group didn't know we had a password. Had to spend a whole weekend doing a digital audit of everyone's usernames and real names like I was running a spy agency from my couch. Did you make everyone change their profile pics to something generic too, or am I just extra paranoid?

mia_singh2423d ago

A friend of mine runs a gaming Discord that blew up to 200 people overnight from a streamer shout-out. Suddenly strangers were in there, sharing phone numbers in the open chat. She had to lock everything down and manually vet each new person for a week, like a bouncer at a club. It really changes the vibe when you can't just trust everyone in the room anymore.